Bitcoin Plunges By Nearly $30 As Largest Market Suffers Outage

http://mashable.com/2013/04/03/bitcoin-value-plunges/

by cooldeal • 13 years ago

100 111 13 years ago

rheide2• 13 years ago

Still worth more than yesterday.

pkfrank• 13 years ago

Isn't this amount of volatility, even if it's trending upwards, a terribly worrying sign, and one that points to a probable bubble burst?

TomGullen• 13 years ago

Highly volatile doesn't mean it's a bubble

rheide2• 13 years ago

To add to that, it also illustrates the over-dependence of the bitcoin community on a single exchange site. What I was trying to show is that, despite those pretty major problems, Bitcoin is still massively popular. Hopefully it can come out on top in the end.

wmf3• 13 years ago

Bitcoin is highly volatile and it's a bubble, but these seem to be unrelated problems. The volatility hurts people who are trying to sell alpaca socks and the bubble may hurt speculators.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Yes, that's what's troubling about it.

jacob0192• 13 years ago

all this volatility makes owning bitcoin feel like gambling.

tibbon• 13 years ago

A month or two ago, I spent $100 on Bitcoins. I figured this was an acceptable amount to 'gamble' like I was in Vegas. Might go up, might go down- but I found the risk to be acceptable for the amount.

Kequc• 13 years ago

If I was lucky enough to be in your situation I'd cash out my ~650usd and call it a day. I wouldn't feel remotely bad about it even if bitcoin kept going up. At this point it was a sound investment that paid out well.

klochner• 13 years ago

probably because most activity is currently speculation/hoarding rather than actual use.

dmiladinov3• 13 years ago

I might be mistaken here, but isn't Bitcoin the currency with an ultimately fixed amount, with a known, predictable rate of growth (of the number of Bitcoins in existence)?

How can this volatility then be attributed to Bitcoin, and not the other currencies it is valued in? I freely admit, I'm less than a novice when it comes to ForEx, but a statement like

> "The value of bitcoins, it turns out, is highly sensitive to media coverage," wrote Reuters' influential financial journalist..."

seems to me to be exactly the opposite, i.e. media coverage is causing other currencies to fluctuate and the Bitcoin valuations are just a reflection of this.

milesskorpen• 13 years ago

Presumably because the purchasing power of the other currencies isn't fluctuating anywhere near as much. If Bitcoin were stable, you'd expect it to be able to buy basically the same amount of oil, gold, food, etc., no?

dhosek2• 13 years ago

Except that the value of goods and services in those currencies have not fluctuated the way that they would if it were the currencies changing value and not bitcoins.

jjcm• 13 years ago

There's a lot of buy-in right now with bitcoin. Because people are seeing the price skyrocket so much, it's made the entire market fairly unstable. People are running huge orders at prices that have never been seen before this week. Since bitcoin isn't backed up by any real-world entity, its valuation is purely what the community thinks it's valued at. Since it's value is tied directly to public opinion, media coverage has huge influences on the price of bitcoin. If forbes does an article stating that bitcoin is the most lucrative investment market, thousands of new orders get placed for bitcoins, driving the price up. If the media says that the bubble is about to pop, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

dmiladinov3• 13 years ago

Yes, thanks, this makes a lot of sense.

jacob0192• 13 years ago

Ultimately all currency, even gold, is fiat money given value only by use. It therefore seems difficult to decouple different stores of value. I think all the media coverage has indeed caused more people to use bitcoin and increase it's relative value. I have a hard time believing that the growth rate is predictable, there are so many unknown variables and it's so young.

danielparks• 13 years ago

It's not just supply — you have to account for demand, too. Demand is likely to change based on media coverage.

Even if it were just supply, the supply effectively changes all the time because not all bitcoins are on the market all the time. If I forget I have bitcoins, they're not part of the supply (of course, the rising dollar value might make me remember…).

DavidSJ• 13 years ago

Value is the intersection of supply and demand. Supply may be fixed, but demand is highly volatile.

jellicle• 13 years ago

I suppose when you leap up in the air, you can't prove that the universe and everything in it didn't just leap downward away from you, in a coordinated fashion to mimic a leap you might have made.

But Occam's Razor is not on your side.

dmiladinov3• 13 years ago

No, I suppose not. Thanks for your feedback! I'm really glad for all the discussion in response to my question!

elemeno3• 13 years ago

Because the daily volume of global FX markets is in excess of $4.5 trillion. The total value of all BTC in existence right now is in the low, likely single digit, billions of dollars.

A major volatility event in BTC will have an almost non-existent effect on FX markets - were every bitcoin exchanged for dollars in one day, it wouldn't even make up 1% of that day's FX trades globally.

A major volatility event in a major world currency (USD, GBP, EUR etc.) would have a massive effect on pretty much every market - it would effect FX, Futures, Fixed Income and Commodities markets, not to mention stock markets and derivatives markets.

Given the absence of the later, it's pretty safe assumption that the volatility is in BTC and not conventional FX markets.

jussij• 13 years ago

> How can this volatility then be attributed to Bitcoin, and not the other currencies it is valued in?

Because if you were correct, that would meant the USD appreciated about 20% overnight which obviously it did not do.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Can we just chip in to a graph in the top-right corner that shows the exchange rate of BTC vs. USD, and leave it at that? I'm sure someone could write an extension for that.

Saves us a lot of this. :P

craftkiller• 13 years ago

http://bitcoinity.org/markets?exchange=mtgox

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

If this market isn't being manipulated then I'm a monekey's uncle. I've been watching it on and off all afternoon, and I keep seeing it move rationally (ie price changes are a function of the size of the trade) and then irrationally (sudden discontinuities on tiny trades). For example, I just watched it decline from ~126 to 115 over a few minutes, and then suddenly jump up by +10 on a 0.03 BTC trade. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the efect of lag here, but it looks shady as heck.

Edit: Also, spreads of over 10% among different markets? Yeesh.

iguana2• 13 years ago

Everyone, sell your bitcoins, quick!

zalzane• 13 years ago

This might have been funny if hundreds of people didn't spam it every day in hopes of manipulating the price.

One of the worst part of the bitcoin community right now is the number of armchair speculators who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and think it's clever to go into the bitcoin IRC/forum and allcaps that people need to start selling their bitcoins because "ITS GUNNA CRASH" in a baseless hope that it will drive the price down.

iaw• 13 years ago

From my armchair I'll simply say : "It's gonna be volatile!"

I've stayed out of bitcoin because the market drivers are non-transparent. There are a lot of speculative investors in the market that are waiting for more gains before they close out their positions. Whenever these investors close out you have the potential of increasing the amount of liquid bitcoins in the market. Presuming demand is growing at a continuous clip this would drive the price down to a lower level.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

iguana2• 13 years ago

Market corrections due to hacked wallets and DDoS, which is quite interesting to watch. I'm guessing those with heavy bitcoin reserves paid for the DDoS to keep the massive wallet theft from moving the market. Instead, it pushed the clueless speculators out, dropping the price. Whoops.

pekk• 13 years ago

And what about the people holding lots of BTC who are going on about how it's going to be more stable than the dollar?

rdl4• 13 years ago

MtGox seems like the weakest link in Bitcoin.

I don't understand why a Magic the Gathering site is the big exchange still, and yet people keep creating wallet providers (which is kind of cookie cutter and inessential), vs. an exchange (which is inherently centralized, very technical vs. UI/UX centric, security sensitive, technically interesting, and a natural monopoly). There's some value in being a wallet provider with great funding/redemption options, but that's a hard business which touches a lot of regulation and legacy banking.

I think the big opportunities in BTC are: hardware/trusted wallets, trusted cloud-hosted wallets, an exchange provider, and most interestingly, derivative issues (currencies, instruments, contracts) with BTC as the underlying. Not "yet another web wallet provider".

A wallet provider is essentially retail. An exchange is where wallet providers should be going to offload risk, ideally with the exchange itself taking zero risk; let market makers do it. The only thing the exchange needs to do is publish prices and handle execution/settlement (which is trickier due to the lack of a "bitcoin-USD", "bitcoin-JPY", etc., but can be approximated by retaining USD, JPY, etc. balances on account.

wmf3• 13 years ago

MtGox is supposed to be replaced by CoinLab (which will still be called MtGox but will apparently be a completely different backend) any day now.

dan1234• 13 years ago

I'd be concerned about the legal angle of running an exchange. Can you just create one or are they regulated? I know it would be different for each region, but at what point does it change from being a web app to something of significant interest a country's financial regulators?

As has been said, a wallet is easy and could be run with minimal effort as a side project. I think you'd need a lot more than technical knowledge to be able to manage an exchange.

rdl4• 13 years ago

I could do a fully US licensed one (via CFTC, not SEC) for $500k in legal compliance and ~$2-3mm in dev/ops costs. Costs would be about 25% of that overseas (again, fully licensed by local regulators; at minimum a "no action" private letter ruling that you're not a banking institution (since you don't make loans/take deposits), but just a financial service provider like a traditional currency exchange, but much more ideally a fully recognized financial market with participants).

(IANAL of course, and IANAS7)

gojomo4• 13 years ago

I don't understand why a Magic the Gathering site is the big exchange still...

I think you answer your own question:

...an exchange (which is inherently... a natural monopoly)

MtGox would have to stumble very, very hard to create an opening for another exchange, which would have high start-up costs (because of those interesting security and technical challenges). If you were sufficiently deep-pocketed and bullish on Bitcoin, sure, but most are chasing lower-hanging fruit without an incumbent leader in a natural monopoly role.

I'd agree that wallet provision is a weak opportunity, except perhaps as part one of some deeper strategy.

I think some are attempting to take on MtGox obliquely: Ripple/OpenCoin via its network's distributed books and TradeHill via its recently-restarted professional investor services.

rdl4• 13 years ago

I'd fight for a position which has a natural monopoly even if there's an incumbent in the space if the incumbent isn't particularly strong. If BTC becomes 100x bigger, MtGox's current position doesn't matter much. If BTC (or other cryptocurrency in general) doesn't get 100x bigger, it doesn't matter and both MtGox and a new competitor will fail/be irrelevant.

elemeno3• 13 years ago

The security and technical challenges aren't as high as most people seem to think and are pretty familiar to people who work on the technical side of trading in the financial world. I would imagine though that most of the people with the knowhow are already in jobs lucrative enough that theres little incentive to write a BTC exchange.

Or at least that's how my calculations go - while I've got the technical and financial background to make me tempted to write a derivatives platform for BTC, I already make a decent salary and my perceived risk vs profit calculation doesn't work out to a number that would make it worth my while. Unless I get bored enough to do it anyway!

scotty793• 13 years ago

> MtGox would have to stumble very, very hard to create an opening for another exchange

That's not true. Largest BTC2PLN exchange bitomat.pl lost it's wallet about two years ago. Mtgox bought them with their customers, covered for the mishap and started trading in PLN with very convenient PLN money transfers. In the meantime another exchange was created bitchange.pl but after bitcoin price crash it was closed. It was reborn with same software as pln.bitcurex.pl and now has larger volume of BTC2PLN trade than mtgox. It doesn't take fee on trades though.

So multiple exchanges are possible.

kinghajj• 13 years ago

IIRC, the founder of Mtgox, the Bitcoin exchange, is not the same person as the founder of the "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange." The domain was transferred.

kirian• 13 years ago

from http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/1/4154500/mt-gox-barons-of-bi... "Karpeles bought the site in 2011 from its founder, Jed McCaleb, also known for developing the infamous video-sharing site eDonkey. McCaleb originally started Mt. Gox as an exchange for Magic: The Gathering playing cards, which explains its odd name, but his growing interest in Bitcoin soon surpassed his affinity for Magic. Seeing the need for a central exchange where users could match buy and sell orders, he converted Mt. Gox to a Bitcoin exchange in 2010."

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

I really don't understand how MtGox's trading engine "lag" gets up to hundreds of seconds. How is matching up buy/sell orders at all a computationally difficult problem? The volume is tiny compared to normal stock exchanges.

deepblueocean• 13 years ago

This demonstrates perhaps the largest real threat to the bitcoin ecosystem right now: the exchange markets are heavily concentrated. Confidence in the system is, right now, heavily based on the perception that Bitcoins can be traded readily for something (pizza, drugs, dollars, quatloos...). Anything that alters that perception will, of course, have a big effect on the price.

In fact, exchange risk could lead to something akin to a bank run - the exchanges only keep a small reserve of national currencies and Bitcoins to handle orders and are essentially acting as market makers. But a big swing in the demand for either Bitcoin or real currencies could push the exchanges into a tight spot. If they don't have enough Bitcoin, obviously, the price rises until the demand for Bitcoin subsides. But if they don't have enough (say) dollars, then the price must fall. And there's a natural death spiral: as the price falls, particularly after such a big run up as has happened recently, people might suddenly decide that it's time to get out. But that only increases the demand for (scarce) dollars. And so the value collapses.

Here's the real Bitcoin security question: can someone precipitate this situation? Maybe someone who benefits from a collapse of the Bitcoin price (say a law enforcement agency that wants to affect the Silk Road business or, if you don't like that, then say any entity with a significant short position on Bitcoin exchange markets). This is not a question I've seen previously addressed in Bitcoin literature or even musings on the various Bitcoin forums. It's a security economics question. I'm interested in the answer.

By the way, my current favorite term for such a situation is the "Goldfinger attack" on the theory that while Goldfinger wanted to steal the gold from Ft. Knox (in the novel version), such an adversary wants to invalidate the coins in Mt. Gox.

nazgulnarsil• 13 years ago

AFAIK MtGox is NOT a market maker but merely an order book.

JumpCrisscross2• 13 years ago

For those wondering why we don't have a Bitcoin ETF, this is one reason. Making a reliable market in decentralised and pseudonymous Bitcoins without an exchange is very difficult. An ETF needs a reliably liquid underlying market to keep a lid on tracking error [def]. We need more competition in U.S. dollar Bitcoin exchanges, preferably a FinCEN-compliant one.

[def] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trackingerror.asp

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

Why would anyone want an ETF? They can buy the currency directly at the exchange, and this way don't have to pay some intermediary's salary.

rdl4• 13 years ago

Being able to buy BTC-ETF would be nice within your 401k/Roth IRA/etc.

(It would also be awesome to get a 401k to offer BTC, even if it has to be within a "self directed" fund. I think I know someone on hn who has family members in the 401k administrator business...)

BrainInAJar• 13 years ago

Same reason NYSEARCA:GLD and others exist, so you don't have to worry about securing the underlying (your broker/trading platform takes care of it), you can short it easier, etc.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

Transaction fees are lower in standard financial outlets.

dangrossman2• 13 years ago

MtGox just tweeted 5 minutes ago that they're being hit by a DDoS. Their site is essentially non-functional beyond the public cacheable static pages.

https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/319563995759652864

nlh• 13 years ago

I feel a bit silly writing essentially the same comment twice in a week, but...

Holy cow. Bitcoin was at $145? I wrote a comment 6 days ago expressing shock that it was at $100, since the last time I checked it had been at $60.

If a 45% rise in one week coming on the heels of a 300% rise in one month doesn't raise your eyebrows, I don't know what will.

I continue to watch this unfold, fascinated, popcorn at the ready.

tatsuke95• 13 years ago

>"I don't know what will."

The major exchange getting DDOS'd, a popular online wallet service provider getting hacked, and a plunge in the price of Bitcoins perhaps.

All of this days after the discussion around here was about BitCoins usurping major currencies. I don't get it.

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

I lost money in the last bitcoin crash because I bought right before it all went downhill.

It's obvious people aren't using bitcoin to shop, but instead using it as an investment.

In one quick moment heard mentality will respond by "cashing out" their bitcoins for money (something that is actually accepted and can be used to by things) and this will create a chain reaction. One by one everyone will flip out, won't want to miss out on their cash, and start purging their bitcoins for ever lower numbers until the currency is devalued.

There will be another crash, people will forget or think "things will be different this time", and will once again start building the next bitcoin bubble. I think I might actually buy some during the crash when they're real cheap. Every year bitcoin's popularity rises and more people get suckered into it.

modeless2• 13 years ago

You only lost money if you sold your bitcoins. If you bought bitcoins at the instant before the last crash, you'd still have more than doubled your money even now after the $30 drop. Bitcoin may crash to $1 tomorrow; who cares? The real question is where will Bitcoin be a year from now, and 10 years from now?

dragontamer3• 13 years ago

A crash today would effectively DDOS Mt. Gox. I don't think Mt. Gox would be able to stay up for the next crash. Hopefully... they're preparing for it.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

It's basically (at least given the current climate of EU periphery countries) an instrument to place bets on consumer/investor confidence in the Euro. Now similar speculative behavior exists in other markets including currency, fixed income, etc, but bitcoins have such low transaction volumes compared to other avenues that its Beta (basically the "gain" in engineering terms) is going to be sky high.

markkat2• 13 years ago

On the other hand, I am sure that there are many waiting for this crash, looking to buy in, or buy more.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

If bitcoin will crash, I will definitely BUY.

I think there are a lot of people like me, and therefore I doubt it can crash really hard. There is no panic moment because I can afford to lose all my "investements".

huherto• 13 years ago

s/investment/speculation/g

GhotiFish2• 13 years ago

This is what I want to happen. I want to market to crash so I can join it. I want to use bitcoins in personal projects. I want to try it out shopping, see what can be made with it, play with the projects that have done something with it.

Just not for 150 bucks.

JumpCrisscross2• 13 years ago

Observing the last about 1 year of data (N = 363), BTC/USD has had an annualised daily volatility of 6 880 bps (100 bps = 1 percentage point). This is more volatile than the most volatile U.S. stocks.

What does this mean, practically? A Gaussian distribution is a bad fit for the data. Using the more appropriate Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution [1], we find that this is an event that would be expected once every 3 1/2 years. Still seems high since just last August we saw a -24% day.

[1] http://www.unc.edu/~maguilar/UNCNCSU/NIG_EGW.pdf

gcb0• 13 years ago

It's the same as with any other non-fiat currency. consider bit coin mining as diamonds.

everyone is finding new mines and bandits are active on the more remote ones. So prices get crazy. Bit coin will be like that until we approach the ceiling limit for bitcoins.

when that happen we will have the stable diamond market we have today. but limited by the algo and not by some cartel owning all the mines and buying all the new ones that are discovered to keep diamond supply stable artificially.

until then, enjoy the roller coast!

dragontamer3• 13 years ago

Wait a second... are we sure it was the Market Outage? I'd assume it was when Instawallet's hackers began cashing out on their attack?

dublinben• 13 years ago

Why would they dump large amounts of currency (and plunge the price) when they can just sell it slowly? There's no risk from holding stolen BTC long term.

dragontamer3• 13 years ago

Sure there is. If Mt. Gox goes down before you dump BTC, then you wouldn't be able to convert BTC back into dollars. Mt. Gox has been pretty unreliable recently too...

bennyg• 13 years ago

To think that last July it was at about $5.20, and I scoffed at buying when it reached $6 cause that was more money than I was willing to spend... I'd be rich by now.

qwertzlcoatl2• 13 years ago

That is pretty much everyone's thought that knew about Bitcoin since the beginning. Which should be 90% of people frequenting this website.

chm• 13 years ago

I mined for a week or so in 2011. I wish I had kept on going!

superuser2• 13 years ago

It's back at $126 now.

qwertzlcoatl2• 13 years ago

54 minutes later it's at $132.

PaperclipTaken• 13 years ago

First I want to remember that Bitcoin cost $10 less 24 hours before the $30 plunge than it did afterwards.

Having said that, I don't believe that it will go back up, most speculators will probably be ready to sell after today. It's also hard to say though, because it looks like the volume of bitcoins traded today are equal or less than other days. I can't say for sure, because Mt. Gox isn't loading properly and I'm looking at an unfamiliar set of graphs.

People keep talking about the bubble bursting. Most people don't realize that last time bitcoin flopped, it only lost 30-50% value initially, returning to a value that was still higher than just 2 months before the crash. Bitcoin spent 5 months in a steady decline, not 5 hours. Most early speculators made a profit, even if they couldn't sell until after the crash.

As much insanity as people are predicting, everything will probably be drawn out. If you have bitcoins and are nervous, now is a fine time to sell. If you think bitcoin will keep going up and you bought more than 30 days ago, you will probably be able to come out ahead even if you are wrong.

But you have to appreciate that most of Bitcoin is speculation. Bitcoin seems safe because it is inherently deflationary. That brings an unproportionate amount of speculators to the currency, and causes the deflationary properties to exaggerate. After enough time, the currency will become clearly overvalued. The free market will take care of that in a cyclic fashion.

As long as Bitcoin is used by people for it's anonymous and cryptographic properties, it will be subject to this hyperdeflation/crash cycle. The exiting bits don't last long and ultimately don't make the currency gain or lose terribly extraordinary amounts of value. After a crash, I'm sure bitcoin will still be worth at least $60, which is still fantastic if you bought back when it was less than $15.

Helianthus4• 13 years ago

I don't think you're wrong on any particular point.

But all of this is what makes Bitcoin irrelevant to the global financial system.

A currency can't be used for daily purchases if you have to account for cyclical periods where you just shouldn't spend them!

Couple this with the fact that this time enough of the mainstream media is paying attention, and Bitcoin won't recover. I'd bet a Bitcoin that this is the highest valuation of Bitcoin over its career as a highly interesting experiment in economics.

danpat2• 13 years ago

What are your terms on that bet?

My take on it is that it's a mistake to think it's a currency. It has a lot more in common with gold, but without the heavy lifting.

freefrag• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this life-cycle of a bubble [1]. I know this drop wasn't caused by a loss of confidence in the currency but in the exchange, still I wonder if this was the bull-trap.

[1] http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t106/OnlyObvious/CDOs/bub...

andrewljohnson• 13 years ago

BitCoin is back at 131, still up since the Euro-crisis went to bed yesterday.

ihsw• 13 years ago

The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that the US Government may be involved, sinking their tentacles into MtGox and tracking every transaction.

I seem to recall a global Skype outage shortly after MS purchased the company, and this is eerily similar. I would haphazard to guess that most BTC transactions are USD->BTC so the USG would definitely be interested in that.

wmf3• 13 years ago

Conspiracy theories are not necessary in this case. MtGox has had extensive know your customer procedures in place for a while. FinCEN recently issued explicit regulations for Bitcoin and MtGox indicated that they're already "overcompliant" with them. And MtGox is moving from Japan to the US just to be sure. There's no evidence that MtGox is sending every transaction to the US government, but it sure looks like they would voluntarily do so if asked; no hacking needed.

blantonl• 13 years ago

I'm curious, are there any academic level economic arguments that discuss Bitcoin and it's future? I'm really curious how economists are viewing Bitcoin.

Right now, it is clear that the rise in price is due to investors who see the potential of Bitcoin, thus they are hoarding Bitcoins in anticipation of future avenues that could accept Bitcoins.

All it will take to unleash liquidity in the Bitcoin market will be a major online retailer to announce they accept Bitcoins as a currency. Otherwise, the vast majority of Bitcoin transactions will be trading in iliiquid markets and paying for underground goods and services. Bitcoin isn't going to shake up the traditional goods and services market unless a major online retailer signs up.

... and with a very illiquid market and an immature set of market makers in the currency, it is going to be a while before Bitcoin is legit. Not to mention potential regulatory issues that WILL crop up at some point.

Bitcoin - good luck. I think it can work, but will it work is a whole different story.

gwern• 13 years ago

> I'm curious, are there any academic level economic arguments that discuss Bitcoin and it's future? I'm really curious how economists are viewing Bitcoin.

Here, this may help: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bitcoin

vamur• 13 years ago

Bitcoin price should stabilize if there are more transactions. Biggest issues now are slow payment time, hoarders and over-reliance on few exchanges. I think higher price and faster payment/withdrawal times would decrease the price eventually as bitcoin holders would have more incentive to spend/take profit while the price is high and exchanges would be forced to sell coins after a transaction for merchant withdrawals. For hoarding, if protocol can be updated to charge higher transaction fee for long-held coins, this should make it less profitable to hoard and increase number of transactions.

jrs235• 13 years ago

Why bit coin is a bad currency or store of value? If the grid is harmed then but coins may rise in value but if you still have access to your store, trading will be as reliable and fruitful as eating gold to survive. It's too susceptible to an EMP attack and war (which brings down the infrastructure or grid). Paper wealth only appears on paper.

Bitcoin Plunges By Nearly $30 As Largest Market Suffers Outage

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